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Introducing Roxane Gay &, a new series of essays curated by bestselling author of Hunger, Bad Feminist, and Opinions. For the series launch, renowned cookbook author Julia Turshen writes with moving honesty about how she freed herself from the poisonous cultural conversations about weight, discipline, and how women should look.

Julia Turshen is done with diet culture. 

Raised in a family obsessed with counting calories, success was determined by the numbers on her bathroom scale. As the New York Times bestselling author of beloved cookbooks, including Small Victories and Simply Julia, she loved food and celebrated its social and cultural value, while also feeling a need to control her weight, her shape, and her appetite. 

Her attitude began to shift during the pandemic when she took a break from writing and book promotion to work on a small local farm. Months spent outdoors, harvesting vegetables and carrying heavy bushels, transformed her body, making it bigger yet stronger. To her surprise, Turshen reveled in her new body and the emotional freedom physical labor gave her to eat without harsh restrictions or self-recrimination. She felt she was finally breaking free of the tyranny of body image.

When the farm job ended, Turshen looked for activities that might replicate the joy and strength that work gave her. Which is how she discovered powerlifting.

Through powerlifting — the precise and careful art of hoisting increasingly heavy weights — Turshen learned to listen to her body and what it needed, be it rest, water, another plate on the barbell, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And she found a community of people, women especially, who reveled in the pure joy of being physically strong. “I lift for my younger self and wear my singlet now to make up for all the times she wore a T-shirt over a swimsuit,” she writes, “I lift to show people what it looks like to opt out of trying to erase oneself. I lift to show that to myself.”

Both a critique of society’s obsession with weight and a beguiling memoir of liberation, Built for This is a timely reminder that all bodies should be viewed as a source of power and celebration.